Some More About Science and Faith

If you or I could take a trip on the Way-Back Machine 500 years to any part of western civilization and questioned any of the people we met, say Christopher Columbus for example, we would have been assured that the earth is the center of the universe. It's a calumny on their science, by the way, to think they did not recognize that earth is a sphere. They just believed that earth is the focal point of everything, and every heavenly body orbits our planet.

The Bible doesn't quite say that of course, but there is a clear implication in Genesis, considering that God created earth on the first day, without form and void, and didn't make the sun until the fourth day.

Then along came Copernicus and Galileo with the theory that the earth circles the sun. Earth is demoted to being one among six planets going around the center, our own personal star. Copernicus was wary enough to wait until he was safely dead to publish his theory, and Galileo paid a heavy price for speaking out while still distressingly alive.

Little by little, however, the heliocentric universe became the accepted wisdom. The discovery of Uranus and Neptune did nothing to upset the applecart of peoples' perceptions, but recognition that the sun is part of an enormous star system called the Milky Way certainly did. Now there were millions of stars orbiting a galactic center and the sun was merely one among them, no more significant than others, in fact a pretty ordinary specimen.

Then astronomers began to think that certain fuzzy images in their telescopes might not be nebulae within the Milky Way but entirely different galaxies at mind bogglingly huge distances from us, and each of these new galaxies also contained millions of stars. By the 1950's it was generally accepted that there might be billions of stars. Science-fiction enthusiasts imagined beings somewhere out there, little green men, malevolent monsters intent on conquering us, or wise ET's.

But it was only in the last fifteen years or so that inferential evidence began to accumulate that there really are planets outside our solar system. Recent discoveries indicate planets are common, in systems near and far, most wildly different from ours, some probably similar to our own.

Soon the new space telescope will be launched, with the expectation that it will discover smaller rocky planets, not just gas giants.

During this same time, biological research has pointed out that life on earth originated in tidal pools where long strands of amino acids united to form proteins which, with an electric charge from convenient lightning strikes, became organic. (I learned this in biology class at a Catholic high school in a course taught by a religious brother.)

All this goes to the point that we're not nearly so important in the great scheme of things as our ancestors supposed, those folks we met with our Way-Back machine.

There are religious ramifications in all this science. We have been convinced of human exceptionalism for thousands of years. "For God so loved the world that he sent his only beloved son. . . ." How do we continue to believe this if there are hundreds, thousands or millions of other worlds on which there might be sentient life? Does poor Jesus have to make the rounds of all these planets and save them from their sins?

I say this seriously, even reverently. In a way I wish it was different, that we were the only intelligent beings in the universe. (In fact, we're not the only intelligent beings even on this planet.) It would make things easier.